Caroline Busta

In 1972, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, sharing a space with Gustav Metzger and Stuart Brisley, laid out an array of tinsel, tourist kitsch, and other tailings of human life lived on the floor, calling the piece Celebration? Real Life Revisited. The work’s title, along with its selfsupported lighting schemethe glow of devotional candles and gelled stage spots refracted by decommissioned disco ballsstands, now, as a prescient nod to the post-Fordist Thatcherism that was to come. Before the 1980s, however, the British artist, who was born in 1947 to a Polish

Dubbed “The Great Acceleration,” the ninth iteration of the Taipei Biennial reflects the fact that the acute social, technological, and economic growth witnessed (and caused) by late-twentieth-century life has so impacted our biosphere that many have begun referring to the present day as the “Anthropocene,” a new geological epoch. To grapple with this radical shift, curator Nicolas Bourriaud expands on his famed 1990s-era theorization of relational aesthetics to encompass interactions among “human beings, animals, plants, machines, products and objects” in a biennial

A WEEK before Ukraine’s anticipated elections, PinchukArtCentre, located in central Kyiv just a few minutes’ walk from the city’s Maidan Square, opened coinciding solo shows by three young Ukrainian artists: Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, and Artem Volokitin. Collectively titled “Fear and Hope,” the presentation, curated by the center’s deputy artistic director, Bjorn Geldhof, addresses recent political activity in the region and the structural and psychological changes it has effected. Perhaps surprisingly, given the media’s spectacularization of the nation’s revolutionary unrest, few international

Since the 1980s, Douglas Coupland has been building novels around the alienated miasma of the just-arrived present: surplus stores, Snackwell’s, dead dolphins, semidisposable Swedish furniture. All along, the Canadian author, who first came to fame for his novels Generation X (1991) and Microserfs (1995), has been forging art alongside these zeitgeisty narratives, and now the Vancouver Art Gallery is hosting the first major survey of his work. Set to fill nearly ten thousand square feet on-site and spill into the city beyond, the show is organized according to such topics

More than ten thousand of Larry Clark’s photographs were on view this winter in a small storefront on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side. Clarkwhose early work challenged fantasies of a wholesome postwar America with hard, often graphic images from his personal lifeis represented by major galleries in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Yet, turning seventy-one and deciding he wanted to distribute a portion of his archive, he chose to do so not via private dealer-to-collector sale or auction, but on his own terms and in a way that would make it accessible to his friendsnamely,

A row of thirty two-word text paintings ran the length of Scott Reeder’s recent inaugural show at Lisa Cooley. The variously twee and anarchic pronouncements were painted Ed Ruscha style in acrylic on small panels of stretched canvas (all works 2013), and began with COPS KISS, POST CATS, and FAKE RICH, continued with IFFY IDOL, REAL EVIL, and JPEG LIFE, and finally delivered the viewer to the rear of the gallery with JUST INFO, DARK MATH, and COOL SHIT. Across the room, and filling out the other walls of the main gallery space, luxuriously sized oil and enamel paintings radiated a pleasing

Set along the Caspian Sea between Russia and Iran, present-day Azerbaijan is heir to a long and storied history. Scholars have speculated that the country’s southern forests are the site of the biblical Garden of Eden, while its oil-rich Absheron Peninsula fell victim to some of the Soviet Union’s most devastating acts of environmental destruction; in the intervening years, this easternmost Caucasus nation has been captured, conquered, and occupied by such formidable empires, kingdoms, and khanates as those of the Greeks, Parthians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Persians, Russians, and Soviets.

IN THE 1910S AND ’20S, Georgia was a nexus of cultural exchange, where diverse strains of modernism intermingled and produced singular formsan efflorescence checked by the enforced hegemony of socialist realism. But in recent years, exchange has flourished again, as artists from beyond Georgia have regained access to the country, sometimes staying just long enough to produce a single piecesuch as an outdoor organ that was built, played, and destroyed within the same day at the roving Tbilisi Center for Contemporary Art. For this issue’s special focus on the region, two artists

One year ago, artists Jarrett Earnest, Leigha Mason, Alex Sloane, and Whitney Vangrin opened a small space on the second floor of 121 Essex Street. Called 1:1, it served, variously, as exhibition space, film set, studio, dining room, guest apartment, office, tattoo parlor, stage, and likely more. The gallery officially closed as this issue went to press, its last day being Valentine’s Day, which, at the time of this writing, the directors intended to mark with a banquet called BLOOD (the third installment of Vangrin’s 2012–13 trilogy that also includes SWEAT and TEARS). According to the plan,

Psychopathic hackers, HIV bug chasers, murderers, and meththe excesses of Bjarne Melgaard’s terror-world only grow darker when one knows that the artist’s engagement with these subjects never stops at skin-deep.

Psychopathic hackers, HIV bug chasers, murderers, and meththe excesses of Bjarne Melgaard’s terror-world only grow darker when one knows that the artist’s engagement with these subjects never stops at skin-deep. Now the ripped, disturbingly tan Norwegian is working on A House to Die In, which, true to form, will actually be built. To design this bizarre Oslo studio/residence, Melgaard has been collaborating with Snøhetta, of New York’s World Trade Center Memorial Pavilion fame, and, from cad renderings of mutable s/m chambers to maquettes of decomposing exterior

This living, evolving iteration of the Whitney Biennial (perhaps the last to appear in the famed Breuer building) will give us the American classic in a versatile and fluctuating format.

This living, evolving iteration of the Whitney Biennial (perhaps the last to appear in the famed Breuer building) will give us the American classic in a versatile and fluctuating format: Painting and sculpture installed in an open-plan design such that the idiosyncrasies of the museum’s near-windowless brutalist shell will dictate spatial relations; meanwhile, a designated cinema space––programmed in consultation with Light Industry founders Thomas Beard and Ed Halter––will displace the usual warren of looped-video viewing rooms, allowing invited

For his first New York solo show this past fall, artist, writer, and Bernadette Corporation member Antek Walczak made four paintings. Like Wheel of Fortune boards in midplay, the works comprise lines of incomplete text, the missing letters and words denoted by graphic blanks. Linking the characters and spaces, networks of Picabian lines and arrows explain how the already present letters could be recycled to reconstitute the unfinished wordsas if such decoding were even necessary. Few would require help parsing what these paintings say: When taken together, they spell out the refrain of

Her painting has been described as literally “beside itself,” but she might call it hysterical too, and after nearly two decades in New York making art, playing music, teaching, and writing, the Cologne-born Koether returns to Europe with a major show of recent works: speech acts scrawled in metal-studded liquid glass; gestural, hyperactive renderings of pop star Kylie Minogue.

Her painting has been described as literally “beside itself,” but she might call it hysterical too, and after nearly two decades in New York making art, playing music, teaching, and writing, the Cologne-born Koether returns to Europe with a major show of recent works: speech acts scrawled in metal-studded liquid glass; gestural, hyperactive renderings of pop star Kylie Minogue. In a strobe-lit stage act, a fishnetted hand flips on the smoke machine. I AM WHERE EVERY WOMAN WANTS TO BE one sincerely insincere painting reads, and you get the sense that here analytic

In addition to works of the kind for which Oscar Tuazon is best known—sculptures made using industrial materials such as concrete, Plexiglas, and corroding rebar—his recent show at Maccarone featured a sound piece that served as the exhibition’s conceptual anchor. Entering a dimly lit room, you could hear, from a speaker mounted to a structural beam, the voice of Vito Acconci reading from a text he had written for his architectural practice in 2004, sketching out the philosophical-poetic dimensions of a planned building at the South Pole: “Come into the dark. . . . Slip inside an Antarctica of

The objects populating Moyra Davey’s photographs—analog electronics, unplugged and shelved; empty bottles of whiskey, appearing wherever they were finished—are things whose primary use-value has expired, items largely out of exchange, which exist, in curator Helen Molesworth’s words, “at the margins of commodity culture.” Among the works in the artist’s recent show at Murray Guy, titled “My Necropolis,” Davey’s “Copperheads,” 1990, a series of close-ups of Abraham Lincoln’s profile on the face of the US currency with the least worth, perhaps pushes this notion the furthest, while also eloquently

Tbilisi, Georgia

“TBILISI IS FAMOUS for its huge watermelons in summer; the currency is called lari, and you get Chanel-stamped plastic bags for your grocery shopping.” Or so Basel-based artist Tobias Madison summed it up. I wanted to see for myself (Google Maps just proffers a beige mass), and so last Tuesday, as friends were calling up Continental tickets to Miami on their BlackBerrys, I boarded a plane from JFK to Kiev with a midnight connection to Tbilisi for the sixth annual “Tbilisi” exhibition—this one organized by Arts Interdisciplinary Research Lab (AIRL) and Kunstmuseum Bern curator Daniel Baumann,

This past summer, under the new direction of Stefan Kalmár (formerly at the Kunstverein Munich), the venerable nonprofit Artists Space underwent a significant physical transformation. Calling on architects IFAU & Jesko Fezer in collaboration with common room (Lars Fischer, Todd Rouhe, and Maria Ibañez de Sendadiano), Kalmár—taking into consideration a related site-specific project Michael Asher proposed for the space in 1988—had all interior walls and all existing lighting removed, and the floor sanded down and left unfinished. To establish spatial coordinates while retaining transparency, the

This summer’s “Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-Garde” made the case for Tbilisi to be known as one of the principal enclaves of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. It focused on the cultural energy of Georgia’s capital city in its independent, postrevolutionary, pre-Bolshevik period (1918–21), though it spanned from documentary photographs of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century to set designs and films made there in the 1920s and ’30s.

You’d imagine finding this kind of exhibition at an artist-run space like its curator Daniel Baumann’s own New Jerseyy in Basel, if not at

This summer at Deitch Projects, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe transformed the gallery’s Wooster Street space beyond recognition. Constructing a main line into the contemporary American imaginary, the artists fabricated a multilevel compound housing a dense network of replicated spaces that, while known to exist within society, typically operate out of sight and beyond the law. Linked by a series of waiting areas and corridors and overseen by jerry-rigged surveillance equipment, the rooms were evocative of such places as a bare-shelved drug-front store, a dropout commune, meth labs, an underground

At first glance, the paintings in “Robert Macaire Chromachromes,” Cheyney Thompson’s fourth solo show at Andrew Kreps Gallery, seemed a stock conceptual prank: thirteen linen canvases offering the painstakingly hand-rendered image, in color, of an enlarged section of their underlying fabric. A second look, however, expanded this seemingly superficial tautology. Having divided the gallery into three rooms in a way that brought to mind the spatial logic of a museum, Thompson presented a succession of historical canvas formats, each painting or diptych taking the shape and dimensions of a different